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Last month, we held KubeCon + Cloud NativeCon in Shanghai, one of the largest open source events in China. Recently, we published the conference transparency report detailing how the 3500 person event went but I’d like to share a couple take aways as someone who has been traveling to China quite a bit the last few years.

https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/1154783210221527040

Cloud Native at China Scale

The scale of operating a popular service in China can be wild when you serve a billion users. This forces many of these companies to operate in a cloud native fashion, similar to their internet scale peers in Silicon Valley. I strongly believe we will see more interesting open source technology born in China over the next decade as they deal with scaling issues, similar to how a lot of internet scale open source technology was born from Google and other SV companies that had to support a larger user base. I highly recommend this great interview from Kevin Xu highlights some of the scale and open source projects coming out of China.

Also, Ant Financial joined CNCF as a Gold End User member, which is indicative of the trends of Chinese companies supporting open source they depend on and sharing the lessons they have learned. For those that aren’t aware, Ant Financial is the largest mobile payments company in the world (Alipay), running on Kubernetes and other CNCF projects. You can read their CNCF Case study here how they run on tens of thousands of Kubernetes nodes serving nearly a billion Alipay customers.

Giving Back: China: #2 contributor to Kubernetes

It’s always great to have consumers contribute code back as that’s one important way how open source is sustainable in the long run.

On the whole, it was a fantastic to spend time with our cloud native community in Shanghai and we look forward to coming back to China next year, stay tuned for details for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 China! For now, we look forward to seeing many folks at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 San Diego which is gearing to be one of the largest open source events in the world.